


Burned For You (Literally)

by BamSara



Category: Don't Starve (Video Game)
Genre: Burns and Lava, F/M, Flirting, Temporary Character Death, Triumphant Willow - Freeform, Who the hell flirts when they're on the verge of death, descriptions of injuries, so much heavy flirting, this mad lad thats who
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 15:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19770778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BamSara/pseuds/BamSara
Summary: Maybe it's the pain, or the blood loss, or the shock, but a dying Wilson sees Willow approaching and thinks "why the fuck not"----Or, the story where Triumphant Willow is flirted with by a delusional, dying scientist.





	Burned For You (Literally)

**Author's Note:**

> For an Anon on tumblr. It was originally supposed to be very, very short, like maybe 500 words, but I got carried away.  
> Note: Graphic descriptions of injury.

It’s not the stupidest way he’s died, but it’s probably going to be the slowest.

Now, by this point Wilson is an expert at patching himself up and stitching himself back together, years of medical practice aiding him during his time out in the constant, turning what should have been fatal wounds into gnarly scars and lessons learned. Blood drips as often as it rains, and he’s had more than enough broken limbs in his stay to account that he can say that he’s broken every single bone in his body at least once on separate occasions.

There’s no medical training in the world to save him from this, and in all honesty, it was entirely his fault.

A woman stands a few feet away, clean and untouched from the hellscape around her, hands clasped behind her back. She watches Wilson scoot up til his back touches a nearby boulder and rest, gazing back at her in a daze of agony.

She looks so pretty in a black dress, the same color his skin has been burnt to beyond repair. Past the first layer of the skin, the second layer, all the way down to the bone and then some. He would be in even more pain than he could imagine if he wasn’t certain that most if not all the pain nerves in that side of his body has either been fried away or shut down.

He hears the clack of heels come to the side of him, and Wilson looks up with the eye that wasn’t a mass of burnt flesh and tissue. “Willow.”

“Another experiment?” She tilts her head, peering down at the damage. There’s still a little bit of molten rock on the front of his vest, though it was hardly recognizable as a vest anymore. “This is a new mistake for you. I think it’s going to my favorite.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” His voice is raspy, his throat was spared a minuscule amount of the burns but there’s fluids building up in his lungs and making his chest feel heavy.

The desert surrounding them is empty for the most part, save for the few lakes of lava nearby enough he can still feel the heat radiating from them, light just enough to reach in the low evening. Or maybe that heat is the burning sensation that hasn’t faded away just yet, the body sending phantom pangs of agony up his system through nerves that aren’t even there anymore, fried to a crisp like the flesh on his arms and the skin of his mouth.

He tripped and fell. Just a little mishap with balance, and it had such dire consequences. The contents of his backpack are either melted in the pit or scattered out in a mess a few feet away, none of it worth salvaging, not that he was going to be alive long enough for him to try anyways.

But death is slow and his body need time to realize it doesn’t have that much longer, so Wilson looks up to a familiar face and musters up a lop-sided smile. “I don’t suppose you’ve come to keep me company?”

“I came to see the fire and burning, but I can do that too.” She sits beside him, legs crossed over each other and gives him a small glance over before shaking her head. “You look more of a mess than usual.”

“And you-” A deep breathe. He bites his tongue as a spike of pain shoots up his spine and causes his throat to close up and eyes to water. It fades after a moment. He can’t feel anything, or he feels everything all at once. It dampens after a moment, and he goes right back to looking at her with bloodied cheeks and strained eyes. “And you look lovelier than usual.”

Her lip puffs out in response, brows furrowing and the ends of her pigtails gradient and trailing off. It blends in with the darkened sky. He finds color in her face where there usually isn’t any. A touch of red, like the ribbon she wears around her neck. Willow scans over his injuries with pout. “Flirting won’t prevent your death.”

“No, but seeing your blush makes my last moments a little more bearable.”

Wilson curls into himself a little more, a hitch in his voice. Eyes scrunch up for a moment, waiting for the pang to strike again, but it doesn’t come. His body is on the edge of convulsions, his brain not registering the extent of the damage. He wishes he could see himself, the look that Willow gives him is not expressive of his injury. “Does death always make you this bold? Or have you lost sense of the subtlety that gentlemen should have?”

“I have nothing to lose.”

She squints at him. “Again, your life?”

“You’re still here.”

A pause, and the Queen of the Constant rolls her eyes and Wilson enjoys the smallest of giggles that comes from her mouth. She settles in elegant glory, head leaning on his shoulder, (and that hurts, but he bites his lip until it bleeds and hisses as her head rests on him, though he won’t protest) and picks little pebbles and hardened lava out from his hair and off of his pants slacks.

She looks just as she was before the throne, but now only darker. It looks good on her, it really does, he thinks. But that doesn’t mean he likes it, though he knows she does. The power does that to people, changes them, and he considers himself lucky They’ve allowed her to remember him at all considering.

She’s bit more cruel now, apathetic even, but maybe that’s what’s charming about her.

“I can make it go faster, if you want.” Her voice is a little lower. Hesitant. “Just wait a few more minutes until night falls.”

The offer is so out of the blue and unexpected, Wilson is certain he would have turned his head to stare in shock if it didn’t feel like he was one small move away from going completely into-wait, no. He was already in shock. That’s what this was, yes. The body would agree with him if it could. It’s not really telling him what he needs to know, how long he has before he goes. It’s safe to say it’s no a very long time though.

“And miss the time I could spend with you? I’d rather fall right back into the pit.” He tries to fake a laugh. It comes out more of a hoarse wheeze. “I doubt…I doubt I’ll even make it that long.”

Willow is silent for a moment. “It’s a pretty death.”

His head lulls to the side, resting on top of his own. He can’t feel the texture of her hair, or the skin of her hand as it runs over the remainder of his arm. HIs vision is blacking out.“To you maybe. I’m cooked.”

“Still, this looks much better than all those other times. Burns look good on you.”

“Says the woman who’s never experienced one in her life.”

She glints at him and Wilson can see two bright eyes staring up at him. The amber is faded, a tint over the color so bright it almost makes her entire eye look like pools of white. He’d make a joke about seeing the ‘bright light at the end of the tunnel’, but the energy to do so eludes him, and the scientist never did consider himself a religious man.

“What would you prefer then, huh?” She asks him. Her voice is the only thing he can make out between the sizzling that’s still happening to the flesh of his leg. The smell was atrocious. “If you could pick your favorite death, what would it be?”

“Are you seriously asking me what’s my favorite way to die?”

A smile comes to her face and he’s nearly blinded by it. “You do it so many, you might as well have one.”

A pause. The scientist thinks for a minute. It takes his brain to work overtime, because yes, it knew it was dying, there was nothing he could do about it, so the pain signals it should be sending are dulled the closer he gets to death and Wilson honestly thinks about all the times he wished he had been that lucky to have the privilege. “This one, I think.”

Her smile falters a moment. The shadows creeping on the edges of his vision listen intently, looking from her to him and back again. An audience. “Really? Not the time with the beefalo? Or the frogs? Or the Bearager?-”

“Now, the frogs is probably the most pathetic I’ve had.” He tuts at her. Even dying, the facade he keeps up is holding strong. “I was afraid of any day it rained after that.”

“What about the time with the hounds?” She teases right back. So light hearted to the face of a man on his last breathes. “That was pretty stupid of you.”

“Don’t blame me for that one. Chester was going to die. I had to do something.”

“He never dies truly.” A hand comes over his own. He only notices it because he sees the blur of it coming down upon his own, (he’s missing fingers, two of them fallen off from being burned through the bone, a third hanging by a sliver of flesh. She doesn’t seem grossed out by it at all.) “I guess, neither do you.”

“Dying gets easier. Doesn’t make it feel any better.” He scolds her. An attempt to flex his hand only confirms that his body has gone completely numb and out of his control, so he just lets it sit. “This is favorite death, I suppose.”

“Because I’m here?” She’s caught onto the next thing he was going to say. Clever girl. “I can still kill you if you want. I can throw you back in.”

A chuckle, a real one, escapes him. God, his voice is so far gone. Too raspy, too aged. Willow looks to him with curiosity. She awaits his answer, but he’s too tired and too lost in his head to speak right away. Wilson tries to match her smile. Out of all the ways she could end his life, her preferences are always the same. “No, I think I’ll pass up on that offer. I’d like to enjoy this a little while longer.”

Willow raises a brow. “You enjoy _dying_?”

“I enjoy your company. If you look at it with some optimism, it could be considered a date.”

She laughs. “I think I prefer my dates with boiled lobsters, not boiled scientists. Never been on a date with someone so…” She trails off, waving a hand around. “ _Crispy_ , before. Or so punful.”

He opens his mouth to speak and cuts short when a cough racks his lungs, spewing up blood and saliva and whatever else the body expels when it expires. He spits it off to the side, and returns to face her with the attitude of a man who’s experienced death one thousand times over by now. “Would you like to hear another one?”

She wrinkles her nose and snickers at him. Her eyes are different, the way she walks and talks is different, and she’s certainly not the most angelic person on the island, but some things haven’t changed. Her giggles are just as delightful as he remembers them to be. “Is that really how you wanna spend your last breathes?”

His heartbeat is slowing. Sputtering, pausing for a moment and starting again in a futile fight to keep him alive. “I have other way I’d like to spend them with you, but that can be saved for another day.”

She snorts into his shoulder, the ends up her pigtails float up, little wisps brushing against his nose. “Okay, okay. Now I know you’ve gone completely bonkers from blood loss.” A squeeze on his arm that he can’t really feel. “Any last-” Willow has to sniffle another giggle. The flush on her face is warm. “Any last requests before you die?”

Wilson gives her a poor excuse of a wink. “I’d ask you to cremate me, but it looks like the job is already done.”

She laughs again. He wants it to be the last thing he hears. He’s trying to make it that way.

Laughter truly is a natural pain reliever. Whether or not it was his own didn’t matter.

Eventually, it really is the only thing that he can truly sense, because the world is darker and his body feel phantom. Wilson feels the approach of death like an old friend on a weekly visit, and inwardly thanks the sense he had to put up preparations for his demise back at camp.

There’s a slight shuffle, like she’s moving closer to him. But he can’t make out her form, or feel her touch, or even smell the charred remains of his almost-dead corpse anymore. But something tells him she’s not deterred by his lack of senses or response she gets when she moves.

“I’ll see you on your return. Next time, you should let me handle the hot stuff.”

Wilson opens his mouth, but his mind blanks. A last breathe lets out before he even loses consciousness, and he has a sneaking suspicion she’s pressed a small kiss on his forehead before everything disappeared.

You would think that dying again and again and being constantly resurrected would eventually get old, and you would be completely right. Climbing out the meat effigy is almost second nature by this point and he’s already adjusting his collar and dusting off his vest even before he’s pulled his leg out of the wooden statue’s encasing.

A glance around his camp. The bonfire is lit, the flames trialing off into the wind like a storm, but Wilson doesn’t even feel so much as a breeze. So he follows the trial with his eyes and his gaze falls on a woman in a black dress, standing too close to his science machine for his liking and rocking back and forth on her heels.

Willow turns to face him as he approaches, and he thins his mouth into a line when she smirks and points to his face. “You look so much better without that mangy beard anyways.”

“Hush. You liked my beard.”


End file.
